I meant to mention this in the chat last night, but forgot to. Apparently DirecTV will still show the regular TV feed in the corner of the screen (including commercials) on each of the driver dedicated channels in this package.

Also, of the five drivers covered each week, NASCAR will be choosing one of the drivers to be covered.

I meant to mention this in the chat last night, but forgot to. Apparently DirecTV will still show the regular TV feed in the corner of the screen (including commercials) on each of the driver dedicated channels in this package.

Do you know when they will list the channels? And what if (hope, hope) a certain someone does not make the 500??

Nope, I still haven't seen the actual channels listed anywhere yet. But, don't worry, I'll keep checking all the audio-visual forums and the DirecTV webpage.

Sometimes, when they have special events like this, the channels just "show up" on your guide. For instance, the NFL network broadcast several games in HD last fall and a special channel for that (#95) just showed up right before game time. I had heard about it already on the Tivo forum, so I knew where to tune in advance, but a lot of folks didn't I don't think. I'd certainly hope they give more advance notice about the Hot Pass channels before next Sunday though.

As to Mikey-Mike's in-car stuff, I'd assume they'd switch the coverage to another driver if he fails to make the 500. We'll certainly know by Thursday evening, so that ought to give them plenty of time to equipment another team before Sunday.

Nope, I still haven't seen the actual channels listed anywhere yet. But, don't worry, I'll keep checking all the audio-visual forums and the DirecTV webpage.

I am assuming that the channels are 794 to 798. Channel 794 is listed in the on-screen guide as "NASX," for which the first three letters match the first three letters of NASCAR. There are five channels, so go sequentially.

DirecTV has still not announced which drivers will be assigned to which channels for the Daytona 500. That information will be on channel 220 as soon as it is available.

Thanks for the info, Desmond! I never thought to look at that "bank" of channels. Aren't those the ones they use for NFL Sunday Ticket. I have most of those number ranges locked out, so they don't show up in my guide. I like to narrow down the channels to just the ones we watch, so you don't have to scroll through so many when looking at the guide. I'll also check out channel 220 as well.

Nope, those are channels 701 to 721. Each sports package gets its own sequence of channels. This is so that more than one sports league's pay-per-view games can be seen at the same time if they are in the same season (e.g. NFL and NASCAR).

Edit: I happened to just click on a link somewhere to "learn more" which took me to the DirecTV page for Hot Pass. It states the following information (though the number for the upper range obviously should be 799):

"SUNDAY FEBRUARY 18th is your chance to Ride Shotgun for FREE.It all starts at 3:30pm ET on DIRECTV Ch. 794-499."

The consensus of 16 people at my house to watch Daytona is that even the "free preview" of Hot Pass was not worth the money.

I thought we'd have the luxury of switching to one of the channels when Fox went to commercial and maybe hearing some driver in-car radio conversations. Wrong! Not that I should be surprised since Mike Joy told me they'd be showing the commercials on those feeds, but for some stupid reason, I thought they might still include the driver audio instead of the sound from the commercials. Wrong! Also, every time we did switch the announcers for the drivers were just sort of rambling. Almost never was there any driver comments. To me, hearing an announce crew trying to find things to say about that one driver was extremely boring. But then, I'm not a devoted fan of any one driver. I'm sure many folks will spring for the $99, but then too many people seem to have way too much disposable income these days.

There was also like a three split screen on at all times, I believe, and none of them in HD, so everything was very small and blurry IMHO. If anyone else checked it out, please let us know your impressions.

Cheryl, there were at least two driver interviews. One was with Dale Earnhardt Jr., and the other was with Kevin Harvick during a red flag delay.

I hated the fact that the announcers were absolute homers. "We're in (number) place" and "We need a caution" were very much heard on the channels.

Also, following the trend of going outside of racing to find announcers, two of the voices were Brad Sham and Barry LeBrock. Sham is the play-by-play announcer of the Dallas Cowboys and LeBrock is a host on FSN Final Score on Fox Sports Net.

When the DirecTV guy was on Claire's show last week, he said they WANT and EXPECT each driver's broadcast team to be biased - homers if you will. So if you think it will change or be different for other drivers throughout the year, you probably won't want to buy the package.